Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Visually Measuring the Cumulative Intelligence of Your Processes

In my latest blog series, I have been enumerating the ways to measure the intelligence of your processes. While ISAA is a good way to rate the cumulative intelligence of your processes, none of this means anything without a visual way of grokking that intelligence. You can't harness and guide this intelligence without some great ways of visualizing the business outcomes, alternatives towards creating better alternatives proactively, and the results of changes. In other words "You can't manage what you can measure and visualize"

I propose the following five levels of visualization that build on each other:

Push Visualization:

Many of the visualizations are designed by others for specific roles. These are generally in the from of multi-panel dashboards and with some minor personalization and viewing options. These are good for "keeping your eye on the ball" for desired and known business outcomes. There are usually specific views for process owners, process managers and the humans that are supporting the process. This is a typical visualization approach for a process.

Custom Subscribed Visualization:

When individuals are able assemble dashboard components/snippets and feeds to meet their specific needs within an architecture and visualization pallet that they chose themselves, this is a more of subscription model. This allows for optimum performance as an individual process resource/operator considering both local and end to end business outcomes. This approach also allows for dynamic changes and alternative views of a custom workers workbench.

Warning and Notification:

Even when events or exceptions occur, there are mechanisms for capturing the attention of crucial resources and process managers. It may be a simple as winking lights.When important preplanned events or business patterns occur these mechanisms aimed at asking for a human intervention of an operator or a decision maker. Notification of unplanned patterns or events must also employ unique attention capturing techniques and mechanisms.

Simulated Driven Visualization:

Moving up to proactive visualization will require ways of showing the effect of changes in process action and decisions surrounding possible actions. This where scenario planning and visualizing outcome differences becomes essential for either manually or auto adjustments in process behavior. This can be a separate sandbox with safe test data or real data under new scenarios without actual implementation. Scenarios can actively be preplanned and dynamically switch in and out, depending on process conditions and outcomes. Visualization of such actions need be quite interactice and dynamic.

Gamification:

The ultimate in interactive and dynamic business direction would be combining human resources, machine resources, multiple roles, multiple organizational units, multiple partners in social interactions in a massively multiple online (MMO) gaming fashion to reach desired outcomes in either a "training simulator" mode or in an actional real time mode.

Net; Net:

There are definite levels of visualization that processes can exercise reactively or proactively. We will need learn to utilize various levels and layers of visualization over the coming years